On the way back from Kwale
Spent the week in Kwale, a sleepy town on near the Mombasa coast. The security situation prevents me from spending a whole lot of time there. I find this to be incredibly saddening but its unavoidable. Some people brave it out and stick with it, but I just can’t justify the awful risks.
The Japanese folks are mostly oblivious to it all, or maybe just indifferent. I’m convinced that they have no real concept of threat, given the relative safety of Japan itself. It’s a horribly dangerous situation but fortunately they stay locked inside. Japanese people love to sit at desks, even when they don’t really have to. Japan has yet to appropriate the concept of the mobile office. (Sorry, generalizations abound….)
I’ve caught some infection, but it’s hard to say exactly what it is. At first, it looked a lot like malaria, but then everything looks like malaria. Now, I’m just in a general state of not feeling well. It’s not responding to antibiotics, which makes me suspect that it’s not bacterial in nature. I started a round of ACTs just in case. They leave me a bit loopy, but I’m improving somewhat. A malaria test turned out faintly negative, but it’s possible the antibiotics are skewing the result or that the guy doing the test spilled to much assay onto the test. So, I’m not sure. I have a somewhat better appreciation for why the tests are treated with suspicion by the locals.
In any case, I feel like total hell, but thankfully have a normal appetite and digestion. I deeply crave red meat though, which leads me to suspect that the dizziness is anemia and thus, the cause could be malaria. This might be wishful thinking though. I could simply be exhausted.
Kenyatta is universally hated on the Coast, which explains a lot of the violence here. Though people apt to disregard domestic politics when talking of terrorism here, it’s hard to rule it out given the vast resentment toward the Jubilee party here on the coast. In fact, the lack of attention to security by the Kenyatta administration is likely fueling even more resentment, which might be fueling even more violence or at least, helping improve recruiting numbers for Al Shabab. As crazy as I think Luo politics are, Raila Odinga would have made a far better president.
People here are convinced that Kenyatta is a weed-head. “He is smoking the mari-ju-a-na.”
I spent the last two days convalescing in a hotel located within the Shimba Hills Nature Reserve. As much as I wanted to tough out the guest house in Kwale (which really isn’t so bad at all), I really needed a decent few hours of rest in a somewhat pleasant environment. It was worth it. A real hot shower and a set of clean sheets is worth the extra cash every now and again. The only wildlife to be seen were bush babies and squirrels, who seem to have worked out a deal where one begs for food in the day, and the other at night.
Malaria transmission here is low and it shows. Malaria endemic areas are characterized by low levels of education, part of which may be attributable to the inhibited cognitive development of children due to repeated malaria infections. Even if educational opportunities are available, kids in malaria endemic areas appear to have worse outcomes. It’s somewhat staggering at times, after having worked in Western. Part of it also could be the influence of Islam.
I’m now flying back to Nairobi where I’ll crawl into my bed. If I’m lucky, I’ll not come out for a few days.
Morning reflections on the Japanese Communist Party
I’m still getting adjusted to being halfway around the world where night is finally slowly turning into day and I promise this site won’t morph into a daily blog on Japanese politics (though it wouldn’t matter since noone reads this anyway!)
On my morning walk, however, I was struck by a poster from the Japanese Communist Party which made three points. First, that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will destroy Japan’s economy and the agricultural sector, second that the United States will have to stop using the Osprey aircraft in Japan, and third that Japan should leave the Japan-American protection agreement as soon as possible so that Japan can build a peaceful future.
While I generally like the Japanese Communist Party, I had to laugh. Japan’s agricultural sector is already in major trouble and protectionist policies which insure price floors for aging farmers while restricting supply (which has the happy effect of keeping Japan thin) are not doing Japan’s food security situation any favors at all. Japan is a manufacturing and a consumer economy. It should sell cars and buy food, not rely on the good graces of a corrupt cabal of octogenarians to keep growing rice.
Second, the JCP’s focus on a particular aircraft really doesn’t get to the heart of the problems surrounding bases in Okinawa. The mention of Osprey’s is merely a way of pandering to the mainland vote, while not challenging mainlanders to investigate Okinawa’s situation to any appreciable degree.
The third point was the most troubling. It’s odd that the JCP would hope that Japan leave the Japan-American protection agreement given the current state of Abe’s right wing government. Without fanning more flames of the Yellow Peril at all, Japan will have to think long and hard about the implications of the LDP’s long push to amend the current Constitution to allow Japan to deploy troops outside its borders or preemptively strike targets it deems as a potential threat. Given the unwillingness of the LDP to substantively recognize Japan’s imperial incursion into Asia, and their willingness to agitate China at any cost, I think that the costs could be far greater than the benefits and doubt that the JCP would be around to hold the LDP back.
I know that small parties have to pick their battles carefully to ensure their political survival, but the JCP’s demands were almost comedy. I’m not sure what that makes me. Every year I become more and more cynical about progressive opposition parties and politics both in Japan and in the US. I’m not sure what that makes me. Are they really that poorly informed or is this just political pragmatism?
Obokata Haruko: Shoddy scientist or scapegoat?
I know very little about lab sciences. A few months ago, Obokata Haruko, graduate of Waseda University and researcher at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan, discovered something “too good to be true.” She found a way of creating pluripotent cells, that is stem cells which can become anything, without the awful side effect of inducing cancer in a vertebrate host. Though my knowledge of such matters is sadly lacking, from what I understand, virae are usually used to induce the cell to convert, which can make the cell unstable, and likely to turn cancerous. Obokata discovered that the cell could be manipulated merely by stressing them with pressure.
The results followed the peer review process, were rejected once, and, after revising and resubmitting, were eventually published in Nature. Soon thereafter, the results were challenged and it was discovered that the images accompanying the paper did not represent the content of the paper and had likely been lifted from her doctoral dissertation. Obokata was disgraced.
Yesterday, an article appeared which claimed that even more improprieties were found in Obokata’s doctoral thesis and that she has formally requested that her dissertation be withdrawn. She supposedly lifted portions of her introduction from the NIH website without attribution and had doctored images. Even some of the chapter bibliographies were suspicious:
Each chapter in the dissertation has a separate bibliography. For chapter 3, there is a bibliography of 38 references even though there are no footnotes in that chapter. The bibliography contains the authors of the material referred to, the title, the journal and the pages on which the original article appeared.
However, the bibliography in question is almost exactly the same as the first 38 items in a bibliography containing 53 reference materials that was published in 2010 in a medical journal by researchers working at a Taiwanese hospital.
It is entirely possible that Obokata is a shoddy researcher. Actually, it’s quite likely given the mountain of evidence against her. What isn’t clear, is how her mentors allowed her train wreck of a career to happen. Research doesn’t occur in a box. I’d certainly be entirely happy if no one at all ever looked at my dissertation again (outside of the published papers from it). But, one would assume that the most egregious of infractions would be caught by her committee members (and her co-authors) before the work goes into print.
It’s worth nothing that Obokata, like a lot of academics, is quite odd. She had her lab repainted pink and yellow, and would don a Japanese smock more characteristic of kindergarten teachers rather than a traditional lab coat. Though I encourage such behavior, I’m not sure that her eccentric style is doing her career any favors at this point.
This incident brings more than a few conflicting ideas to mind.
First, Japan is a terrible, awful place to be a woman in a professional position. In fact, Japan is pretty much just a terrible place to be a woman at all. In terms of women’s empowerment, wages, education and political representation, Japan is 101st out of 135 countries, well under less developed countries like Kenya, El Salvador, Bangladesh and Indonesia, and among the worst in all of Asia.
Once, I remember when I was visiting Japan, a tenured faculty member who happened to be female was tasked with serving us men tea. I was enraged.
Though Obokata is likely less than professional, professionals are made, not born. I can imagine that, given her reproductive capabilities, her mentors refused to take her seriously, and slacked on their most important job, which was to create and nurture a responsible and talented scientist.
Of course, Obokata, though likely a victim of shoddy mentoring, has to shoulder some of the blame. Shoddy mentors create shoddy students, but shoddy students still have to take responsibility for their own actions. But I can’t help but thinking that it’s interesting that a young female is taking the heat for what should be a collective fuck up.
Obokata is currently being eviscerated in the press. After making numerous appearances on television as an eccentric though brilliant scientist, her downfall has brought out the worst. Many are alleging that Obokata slept with her mentors to attain her position (despite being trained at Harvard), following a narrative that women can’t attain privileged positions without having sex with someone. The vile depths of the interweb are even speculating that Obokata will start making porn, a common standby career for fallen actresses and swimsuit idols, again following a narrative that women are never degraded enough.
Does Obokata deserve the brutal punishment she’s receiving? While scientists need to held accountable for their work, given the amount of shoddy research out there, I would say that Obokata is probably being treated rather unfairly. It would seem though, that the extreme nature of her punishment is due to her gender, her age and the fact that she was unlucky enough to appear on Japanese television.
Interview with an academic: Megan Hill, ethnomusicologist
Continuing our series of interviews with interesting academics, this time I have Megan Hill, PhD student and ethnomusicologist at the University of Michigan (Thanks for doing this!).
1. Who are you and where do you come from?
Starting off with existential questions… I’m Megan Hill, doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at UM. I’m originally from Mason City, a town of about 30,000 people in north-central Iowa.
2. What is your current research about?
My research, broadly speaking, concerns contemporary musical practice in Japan, with a secondary specialization in American popular music. Right now I’m writing my dissertation on urban soundscapes. The concept of “soundscape” is usually used to explore the ways that people create and perceive meaning through sound in the places they inhabit, but it has also traditionally been used in an all-encompassing way, assuming a homogeneous and/or pastoral environment.
My dissertation—Asakusa’s Soundscape: Sound, Agency, Place, and Montage—specifically offers a new theoretical apparatus for analyzing the nuanced ways that people experience sound in dense, heterogeneous urban environments. I’m using the Tokyo neighborhood of Asakusa to demonstrate this. I have chosen Asakusa because it is dense and urban, it has a strong unique identity as a particular neighborhood, that identity is defined by a large variety of cultural categories (i.e. “traditional Japan,” religion, international tourism, low-brow entertainment, working-class Tokyo, etc.), and sound and music are fundamental to the ways that people behave in Asakusa and understand what Asakusa is about.
3. Urban spaces are characterized by often contrasting and competing uses of space. Did you find that there was any impact of location on sounds? Did sounds clash or blend in interesting ways?
Yes, absolutely. Certainly “competing” uses of space happen throughout cities, and all around the world, but I think it is particularly interesting how this plays out in Asakusa because of the particular kinds of activities that go on there. Many urban neighborhoods—NYC’s theater district for instance—are defined by one particular kind of activity, but Asakusa is defined by its particular amalgam of several contrasting activities (those having to do with “traditional Japan,” religion, international tourism, low-brow entertainment, and working-class Tokyo). Because of this, I find that the sonic overlap that goes on there is particularly fascinating, and has particular implications for how people perceive the space. You used the word “competing” to describe the use of urban spaces, but what I see going on in Asakusa is often more like juxtaposition. Contrasting sounds overlap, but because all of them “make sense” within the larger space, the resulting sense isn’t one of competition but one of montage.
For example, there is an amusement park called Hanayashiki which is practically bordering the precincts of Sensô-ji Buddhist temple. The screams of people riding the drop tower and roller coaster can be heard easily from the steps of the temple’s Main Hall, and those sounds mix in with the sounds of rituals that take place in the temple, as well as the boisterous sounds of tourists that fill the Main Hall and the rest of the precincts at all hours.
4. I know that you share an interest with things Japanese. All of us Japanophiles have unique set of events which brought us here. What brought you to Japan?
I started out, in my undergrad at Wartburg College (a liberal arts college in Waverly, Iowa), studying music education. Growing up, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in music in some way, but coming from a fairly small town with few visible music careers (high school band director and church musician being pretty much the extent of things), I decided music ed was the way to go for me. I studied that for two years with moderate levels of emotional investment, but along the way I was exposed to the field of ethnomusicology through one of my professors, with which I became totally enamored. I changed my major to clarinet performance (which allowed me to drop the education courses and add electives in ethnomusicology) at the beginning of my third year. At the same time, my dorm roommate was a woman from Tokyo in Iowa to study psychology (long story) who came to be one of my best friends. Studying ethnomusicological / anthropological theory in the daytimes and coming home to talk with my roommate about everyday things—but also Japanese music and culture—in the evenings basically started me out on the road that led me to where I am today.
5. You spent a year (or two?) in Tokyo. What were you doing there?
I’ve lived in the Tokyo area on two occasions, actually. After my undergrad in 2006, I got a job with AEON (national English-conversation school) and was given a teaching position in Koshigaya, Saitama, about 20 minutes north of Tokyo. I basically used the teaching position and visa as an opportunity to live in Japan and learn real-life things for 13 months before pursuing a graduate degree focusing on Japan. I had a great time learning all I could, talking with my fantastic students, making friends, learning to play the koto, and doing research for a paper on the use of gendered pronouns in Japanese popular music.
More recently, I was living in Tokyo doing dissertation fieldwork. I got funding from The Japan Foundation to be there for a year to study the soundscapes of Asakusa, which I’m now using as the basis for my dissertation.
6. You seem to be interested in people who don’t traditionally “belong.” The examples I’m thinking of are that of African-American Enka star Jero, the perception of soundscapes in Tokyo by a Buddhist monk and even Yoko Noge, a blues musician in Chicago. While I could be entirely off the mark, does the breaking of traditional musical belonging play a role in your work?
Interesting interpretation! You’ve been scoping out my academia.edu profile, I see 😉
I would say that you’re on the mark in identifying which topics excite me. I tend to admire people and their work who do interesting things that are against the traditional grain, for sure. And I think your observation that those people are in particular abundance in my research is mostly evidence of my personal taste in that way—Yoko Noge, Jero, and also Japanese female singers like Ringo Shiina, Iruka, Love Psychedelico, and Ayumi Hamasaki wielding gendered-language in pop song lyrics in interesting ways.
I haven’t really approached those topics by focusing on that commonality, necessarily. Contemporary ethnomusicology makes use of all kinds of socio-cultural as well as scientific theories to study musical practice (linguistic, structural, literary, Marxist, cognitive and communication, gender/sexuality, performance, and postcolonial theories, as some examples). I think what you’ve picked up on as a trend in my research is my interest in issues of self and identity, though I am not committed to always exploring those from the same approach. My dissertation focuses on individual agency and music/sound as they intersect with ideas about place, for example, while in my other projects, ideas about self/identity have intersected with music and gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, psychology, globalization, and postcolonial culture.
7. Have you met Jero yet?
Alas, no…
8. You play a number of instruments. Do you play live at all?
I studied piano and clarinet, each for 12 years. With an undergrad degree in clarinet performance, I played a number of solo recitals, as well as countless concerts as a member of orchestras and wind bands.
I studied koto in 2006-7 and was invited to perform at my local 燈籠流し festival in Saitama with my teacher, which was really fun. I also studied Tsugaru shamisen for about 9 months as a part of my dissertation fieldwork, but I’m still a very rough beginner and have no business on a stage… At this point, I don’t have the time necessary to devote to practice to make performing a reality.
9. How did you find your teachers? I’ve heard that people studying shamisen have to spend the first two years doinng nothing but tuning? Did they cut you slack given your limited time there?
I found my koto teacher with the help of one of my English students. He was the son a friend of hers. I took the bus to his apartment every Friday morning before going to work at the English school, which began at noon. He also taught koto at a local middle school as part of the school’s offerings of “traditional” arts which became mandatory in public schools from 2001 I believe. He is also the member of a small indie band called Shiro Neqo, which includes an Indian sitar and tabla and two vocalists in addition to koto. You can see/hear them here.
I found my Tsugaru shamisen teacher in Asakusa. He owns a restaurant where he—and sometimes his higher level students—perform every lunch and dinnertime for customers. I wanted to interview him for my dissertation research, and when I found out that he teaches lessons too, I asked if I could also study with him. We started out learning how the instrument works, tuning, and practicing a simple folksong right away. I did not get the sense that I was being treated differently than other students. I have also heard the only-tuning-for-two-years story, but I don’t know how widespread that regimen really is.
You can see/hear him here (link is down below) with his band, Ryûjin. His sister is the other person playing shamisen in the video
10. What’s up for the future?
Good question… My husband is applying for academic jobs right now (he will be defending his dissertation within the calendar year), and hopefully something will work out on that front. I will be finishing mine by next spring at the very latest, so I will be applying for jobs come the fall. I’m very open to non-academic positions that would allow me to make some use of my degree (I have a friend who works for the National Endowment for the Humanities, for example), or an academic one that would center on teaching, preferably not in the middle of nowhere. I’m too much in the world of my dissertation to have many thoughts on my next research project, but there’s a lot of music out there!
Novartis Japan May Have Overstated Research Results to Sell Drugs: Are Patents the Cause?
The New York Times reported today that Novartis Japan has been discovered to have overstated research results to make the product more marketable.
Advertisements aimed at doctors in Japan reportedly claim benefits of the medicine Diovan, a blood pressure medication, that have not been proven by research.
The ads under investigation, which ran in pamphlets distributed among Japanese doctors, cited studies carried out at Japanese universities that appeared to show that Diovan was also effective in preventing strokes and other heart conditions, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
But a number of universities announced last year that Novartis employees had been involved in carrying out these clinical studies, and that the data they yielded was suspect. Misleading ads violate Japan’s pharmaceutical laws, the ministry said in a statement to the news media.
Overstating results, though not unheard of for pharmaceuticals, is common in advertisements for nutritional supplements and other dubious health products. Unfortunately, it is possible that Novartis Japan is using the same tactics in a desperate bid to insure the profitability (or cover losses) of a lagging product. The patent for Diovan is set to expire soon, perhaps increasing the level of desperation.
I was disturbed to find out that Japan’s regulatory body does not recognize research conducted in areas outside of Japan. Certainlt, the country is known for its insularity and protectionist policy, but this seems counter productive. It would explain why many drugs are unavailable in Japan and why availability lags.
I’m not going to suggest that Japan’s health care system is poor. Far from it, Japan’s heavily regulated health care sector insures affordable care for everyone and fair compensation for doctors. I would say that disregarding research conducted aborad must increase overall costs, making Japan an unattractive market. All research for any new drugs must be conducted from scratch within Japan. This strikes me as odd.
The blog of the Center for Education Policy and Research claims that the patent system has induced Novartis Japan to overstate the results:
It’s Novartis and Japan today. The NYT reports on allegations that the company altered test results to exaggerate the effectiveness of Diovan, a drug for treating high blood pressure and heart disease. This is the sort of corruption that economic theory predicts would result from government granted patent monopolies. By raising the price of drugs by several thousand percent above their free market price, patents provide an enormous incentive for drug companies to misrepresent the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.
Odd. While I also agree that the patent system often works to stifle innovation and impedes access to life-saving drugs in developing countries, I’m not so sure that the patent system has caused Novartis Japan to misrepresent the drug. While the author speaks only patents here, I suspect that (though I have no proof), given the emphasis on the “free market,” he or she might oppose drug regulation as a whole providing an enormous opportunity for drug makers to misrepresent just about anything they like.
The Ninth Millennium Development Goal: Business Development?
Last night I was reading up Japan’s road to industrialization. Specifically, I was learning how it went from a backwards set of earthquake prone islands in 1868 to one of the most powerful economies on the planet.
In 1900, the average Japanese person could expect to live to be about 44 years old, which is almost the same as a Malawian, both in 1900 and in 2013. However, a Japanese person in 2013 can expect to live to be more than 80 years old.
How did it do this? Ignoring the complexities and numerous details, Japan developed because it recognized early on that it had to develop its business sector. Development can’t occur without livelihoods and livelihoods come from cash producing jobs.
For example, following the Meiji restoration, Japan developed a system of land taxation, took the funds and invested them into buying second hand sewing machines from Europe. Rather than aiming for labor saving technologies, Japan aimed for labor intensive, individual sewing machines so that it could leverage as many people as possible. What it lacked in economic resources, it made up for in hands. Japan in the 1920’s then became a major exporter of textiles to Europe.
Japan didn’t stop there. Out of its land taxation system, it also made sure that capital was available for merchants wishing to diversify their businesses and encouraged farmers to convert their crops into products. A soy farmer can process his output into tofu and soy sauce. Similarly, a rice farmer can manufacture sake and sell it.
I am looking at the UN’s Millennium Development Goals:
Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger
Achieving universal primary education
Promoting gender equality and empowering women
Reducing child mortality rates
Improving maternal health
Combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
Ensuring environmental sustainability
Developing a global partnership for development
Out of eight goals, not a single one focuses on private sector development and entrepreneurship, which is arguably, if the cases of Japan and Korea are to be applicable to the African context, the key to consistent economic growth.
Where is the ninth goal? Where is the goal which calls for increased access to capital for small and mid level entrepreneurs? Where is the goal that calls for an elimination of onerous export taxes and corruption which kills the ability for businesses to competitively sell their products to the rest of the world? Why is there no call for proper systems of taxation which allow domestic investment?
The goal of sustainable business development is fundamental to the success of at least each of the other eight goals. I suspect that suspicion and cynicism toward the private sector is the culprit. No doubt, this ambivalence toward business killed the Affordable Medicines Facility – malaria, a supply side subsidy intended to increase access to anti-malarial medications in small private drug shops.
Even in public health, which is supposedly focused on holistic solutions to public health problems, the issue of private sector development and the relationship of economics to human health hardly appears.
People in my field seem to be happy to stick with models of pharmaceutical solutions to health problems, delivered through publicly funded health systems. What they fail to address is how to support those public clinics and hospitals though other means than donations from first world countries.
The evidence that Africans will flourish when given appropriate amounts of capital under reasonable terms (not microfinance as it currently exists) is out there. A strategy to give money to the poor, without strings or promise to repay, conditional on a reasonable business plan found that African households will invest in tools or technology to provide them income in the long term. They find that households which enlarge their business through an influx of capital keep their kids in school longer than households which do not.
I did a small survey of business on Lake Victoria, Kenya and found that businesses’ second most common stumbling block (the first was security) was a lack of access to capital. They need money to expand. Microfinance schemes, with their very high interest rates, are not a viable option to most, though loans at more favorable terms to the right people might make a huge difference.
True development will require a dramatic shift in focus for the development world. We will have to face the reality that business is good for human health, that the negatives of entering the cash economy are small compared with the negatives of trying to fruitlessly maintain a pre-colonial lifestyle in a post-colonial world and that Africans themselves are willing to step up to the plate.
Movie of the Week: 三里塚 第二砦の人々 (Sanrizuka: People of the Second Fortress) (Dir: 小川紳介 Ogawa Sinsuke) 1971
The University of Michigan is hosting a series of films from Japanese documentary film production group, Ogawa Productions. Last night I had the pleasure of seeing “Sanrizuka: People of the Second Fortress” for the first time.
Narita airport was built on agricultural land claimed through eminent domain. Some of the residents, who were nearly all peasant families, sold early on and left. A number of families, however, feeling slighted by the Japanese government’s unwillingness to engage them in dialogue, stayed and fought.
This was no sit in protest, but a violent confrontation of peasants against government and private forces. The peasants built elaborate fortresses to prevent construction on the land, deep tunnels to hide in , and used spears, molotov cocktails and hurled projectiles to protect themselves. The Zengakuren (an anarchist group similar to America’s SDS) maintained the front lines armed with spears and throwing stones at riot police.
The entire scene is filmed like a grand Kurosawa epic. Armed forces besiege a well defended fortress on a hill top, while troops on the ground go toe to toe in battle. The riot police were clearly unprepared for the level of violent resistance they encountered and retreat more than once. In desperation, the Japanese government hires non-locals (at a rate of 20,000 yen a day, presumably to minimize liabilities and accountability) to charge in on their behalf.
A few questions came to mind. First, where did the non-locals come from? I’m wondering if they were hired from the day laborer slums of Kamagasaki and Sanya, again illustrating the complex relationship between anti-social dropouts and the State. Day laborers are simultaneously marginalized by the State and completely necessary to its survival. Even as recently as 2011, despite decades of exclusions and abuse, the Japanese government called upon day laborers in Kamagasaki to clean up Fukushima (again for 20,000 yen a day), presumably since few would care about the threats to their health.
Second, the Zengakuren play a major role in defending the fortress. It is mentioned during the film that the Socialist Party of Japan (社会党) initially involved itself, acting on the behalf of the farmers, but at some point during the five year struggle, became disinterested. It was mentioned by others that the Communist Party of Japan (共産党）was also involved. As I was watching the film, I was wondering how the situation could have become as extreme as it did, and though that these political actors might have agitated the farmers to move to more and more extreme methods. If that was the case, then the farmers might have been mere political pawns for an anti-establishment agenda. Though the Zengakuren obviously stuck it out to the bitter end, I’m wondering if they too might have self-servingly exacerbated the situation.
While Ogawa takes time and care to film and interview the farmers, both individually and as a group, not a single member of the Zengakuren speak for the entirely of the film. In fact, Ogawa never even shows them in close-up. Not only do we not know what they think, we don’t even know what they look like. Even more mysterious are the large crowds of bystanders, which are shown only through holes in the barricades the farmers have constructed or on the tops of hills in the distance. We actually know more about the riot police than any of the Zengakuren.
Third, and a minor point, the farmers had set up a tower with which to broadcast inspirational leftist music and speeches to the riot police and bystanders. It’s not clear why the riot police didn’t knock the largely unguarded tower out immediately. Also, though the film is incredibly violent, one has to wonder how much of the violence is performance. All sides had ample opportunity to kill and injure people, but, miraculously, only a handful of people were killed.
When farmer ladies are chaining themselves to trees to prevent airport crews from entering, they make a big production out of wrapping the chains around their neck, but have arranged them in such a way that one would merely have to bend down a bit to break free. One has to question how serious the farmers were, and how much of the fighting they preferred to leave to the Zengakuren, and whether they wanted the anarchists there at all. Though some of the farmers suggest directly engaging the riot police at one point, it is clear that there isn’t much consensus on how violent they were willing to become.
The relationship of the farmers, who prior to the planned building of the airport had likely lived in relative isolation from the rest of Japan, to the outside political upheaval of Japan is perhaps the most interesting part of the film. Though the farmers are very serious about protecting their land and continuing their lifestyles, they seem rather ambivalent to Japan’s political problems, but are regardless resigned to become a part of them.
As with many documentaries from Japan, it’s unclear how sympathetic the film’s producers are to the subjects they have chosen. On the one hand, Ogawa seems to want to advocate on behalf of the farmers, but on the other, he spends much time showing them as isolated and slightly naive. He makes no attempt to deny the futility of their cause.
“People of the Second Fortress” is a fantastic film. The producers risked their lives to make the film. Miraculously, the camera wasn’t smashed during filming.
Here are some great pictures from that time.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a clip of “People of the Second Fortress,” but here is an extended clip of one of the films from the same series:
I really have no idea what to write about…… but I’ll ramble about worldwide economic inequality for a while
If I don’t do this regularly, my lackluster skills become even more lackluster.
The NYT today (is it even useful for me to talk about the NYT when people can just read it themselves?) featured an op-ed from Economist Joe Stiglitz. Stiglitz, one might remember, wrote an excellent book on the 2008 financial crash. In it, he detailed point by point all the events that led to the worst economic crisis the US had seen since the Depression. “Freefall” is like “Inside Job” for people who read books.
Stiglitz has long been concerned about the growing divide between rich and poor in the US, so much so, that he wrote another great book “The Price of Inequality.,” mostly focusing on domestic issues. Policies which encourage loose markets disproportionately favor the wealthy, creating economic imbalances which marginalize the poor even further. While free market advocates claim that loosening markets liberates the citizenry from government, in fact, by freeing markets, politics shape the market itself, to the advantage of those who hold power. The market, then, becomes as tyrannical as all of those bed time baddies American right wingers keep warning us about. It’s worth noting that in the US, we allowed investment bankers to write banking policy for much of the run up to the crash.
We know that inequality is on the rise in the United States, but Stiglitz argues that America, as a global financial powerhouse, has encouraged a worldwide trend toward financial loosening, exacerbating economic disparities in other countries as well.
…widening income and wealth inequality in America is part of a trend seen across the Western world. A 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark. With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.
I took issue with his listing Japan as an exception. Though Japan’s widening divide between rich and poor may not be as dramatic as in the US, Japanese people on the bottom rungs have watched their incomes fall over time. A slow down of the economy and the deflation era has disproportionately impacted low wage earners there.
Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality. In many countries, weak corporate governance and eroding social cohesion have led to increasing gaps between the pay of chief executives and that of ordinary workers — not yet approaching the 500-to-1 level for America’s biggest companies (as estimated by the International Labor Organization) but still greater than pre-recession levels. (Japan, which has curbed executive pay, is a notable exception.) American innovations in rent-seeking — enriching oneself not by making the size of the economic pie bigger but by manipulating the system to seize a larger slice — have gone global.
He is entirely correct here. Just about every facet of life has been morphed into a commodifiable good worthy of investment and trade on financial markets. This has long impacted agricultural products and created a trend of increasing prices and violent price swings that do little to raise the lives of the international poor.
African countries, lacking the stabilizing effect of steady manufacturing sectors like those in Asia, depend almost entirely on the resource market. Though they experience significant growth when worldwide prices go up (as has been the case for the past decade), a sudden drop in the price of commodities can quickly wipe out last year’s gains. This is similar to the situation of very poor households in the US. One might have plenty of work this week, but be fired the next. Planning for the future is impossible one isn’t sure whether one will have the cash to eat next week.
I’d like to see a comparison of worldwide trends of inequality. Though it is true that African economies were left in the dust until the early 2000’s, and the continent is in a period of excellent growth at the moment, I’m wondering whether the pace of growth is slower than what it would be without loose international commodity markets and financialization.
Of course, one might also argue the the loosening of markets around 2000 is what caused the current trend in growth.
OK, I wrote something. Thanks.
Today’s Readings 1/8/2013
1. A Military Man Denounces Guns.It’s worth the read for the neanderthalic comments. The presence of the poorly worded 2nd Amendment to the Consitution doesn’t not preclude criticism, nor does the color of the subject’s passport (he’s a Brit) compromise his views on guns. Comments are always to be avoided, but this particular set is a ridiculous and unnecessarily hostile expression of jingoistic stupidity. (HuffPo)
2. Part of Obamacare came unceremoniously into effect on January 1st, namely the part where insurance companies have to actually tell you what you’re buying within four pages, using the language of an 8th grader. (HuffPo)
3. Chinese bloggers have to provide their names.. or else. (Bloomberg) Liberal newspapers are fed up and taking to the streets to demand an end to meddling censors (NYT)
4. The US Government is not only NOT a household, its also NOT a small business. It is frightening how ignorant Americans (particularly elected officials) are of the differences between business and government. “In the news release announcing his bill to derail the platinum coin effort, Republican Representative Greg Walden says something really stupid: “My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air.”” I’m glad the US government isn’t a small business. They tend to fail, and provide poor returns on labor and investment. (Bloomberg)
5. An interesting take on the austerity debate. Latvia was more austere than Greece and is now experiencing growth. Given the differences in other factors, such as tax evasion, corruption and past growth, I’m skeptical. (Bloomberg)
6. Japan is dumping some of its reserves to buy European bonds in order to devalue its currency. Let’s hope it works. (Bloomberg)
7. Should we tax people for being annoying? The arguments for taxing negative externalities, like traffic jams and public noise. (NYT)
8. Rape is horrible, but not because women shame their families. That women are still praised for killing themselves following rape in India is reprehensible. (NYT)
Donald Keene Takes Japanese Citizenship: Now Let’s Move On
Donald Keene took Japanese citizenship. Keene is a nearly 90 year old retired Professor of Japanese Studies at Columbia University. He was notable for his many excellent English translations of some of Japan’s most important literary works. Keene served in the US military during World War II working as an interrogator. Keene went to Japan, fell in love with the country and stayed. The New York Times wrote a short article detailing his life and reporting that he had finally retired to Japan.
Truthfully, I found the article quite annoying. Keene was an important member of the unofficial “Chrysanthemum Club,” a group of military associated academics and culturalists who were tasked with repackaging Japan as a friendly and tranquil ally of the United States. The incredibly deep cultural legacy of Japan most certainly cannot be denied, and is deserving of study. The “Chrysanthemum Club,” however, not only whitewashed Japan’s awful militaristic history, but exacerbated the existing “Nihonjinron,” a soul seeking quest of nationalistic Japanese academics hell bent on proving Japan to be “the most unique culture on the planet.”
The myth of Japanese “uniqueness” would go on to inform the manner in which Japan presented itself to the world and the way that Japanese departments and language education would educate. I studied Japanese briefly in the early 90’s at the University of Michigan. We were told that the author of the textbook (Jordan) believed the Japanese language so unique, that it is impossible to foreigners to achieve any level of proficiency. Presumably, because Japanese is “difficult” and that foreign brains are inherently unequipped to handle Japanese’s special nuances.
This “uniqueness” of the Japanese language is, of course, nonsense. Korean and Japanese are so grammatically similar as to almost be dialects of the same language. As for foreigners not being able to learn Japanese, well, come on over for dinner sometime. I’ll invite some of my friends and we can hang out.
As much as I want to venerate Keene, whose great contributions are many, I found my blood pressure rising while reading the NYT article. On taking Japanese citizenship, Keene states:
“When I first did it, I thought I’d get a flood of angry letters that ‘you are not of the Yamato race!’ but instead, they welcomed me,” said Dr. Keene, using an old name for Japan. “I think the Japanese can detect, without too much trouble, my love of Japan.”
or
““I have not met a Japanese since then who has not thanked me. Except the Ministry of Justice,””
These statements appear innocuous, but they are anything but. “A Japanese” grates on my nerves, sounding more like an animal than a human*. Worse yet, it implies that all people in Japan are the same, which they are certainly not. Anyone who speaks Japanese knows what a deeply diverse place Japan is. Keene’s probably well-intentioned statements are, to me, the worst kind of friendly racism out there.
This antiquated idea of Japan’s people as a “race” and the toxic “us vs. the other” attitude that dominated discussions of Japan following the War has got to go. Keene, as a thoughtful academic, should know this. Though I feel bad beating up on an old man, an esteemed individual like Keene should know very well how important semantics are.
When I was in Osaka last June, I had dinner with the head of the Economics Department at Osaka City University. He told me that Japan needed people like me (Japanese proficient academics) because it was so academically behind the United States. While I believe that he was just being kind, I quickly corrected him. Japan and the United States in 2012 are equals and we deserve to treat each other as such. Pandering and antiquated ideas of a strong US and a cute, child-like and fluffy Japan, an idea which Keene still appears to hold, have to finally be put to rest.
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* “An American” is purely a statement of statehood to me. “Americans” are holders of blue passports.
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